There was the shuffling, blundering sound of Ollie coming out of the generator compartment. Like a great many overweight men, his breathing had a slightly heavy wheezing sound.
“David?” His voice wavered a little. “You still here?”
“Right here, Ollie. You want to watch out for all those bleach cartons.”
“Yeah.” I guided him with my voice and in thirty seconds or so he reached out of the dark and gripped my shoulder. He gave a long, trembling sigh.
“Christ, let’s get out of here.” I could smell the Rolaids he always chewed on his breath. “This dark is… is bad.”
“It is,” I said. “But hang tight a minute, Ollie. I wanted to talk to you and I didn’t want those other two fuckheads listening.”
“Dave… they didn’t twist Norm’s arm. You ought to remember that.”
“Norm was a kid, and they weren’t. But never mind, that’s over. We’ve got to tell them, Ollie. The people in the market. ”
“If they panic—” Ollie’s voice was doubtful.
“Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. But it will make them think twice about going out, which is what most of them want to do. Why shouldn’t they? Most of them will have people they left at home. I do myself. We have to make them understand what they’re risking if they go out there.” His hand was gripping my arm hard. “All right,” he said. “Yes, I just keep asking myself… all those tentacles… like a squid or something… David, what were they hooked to ? What were those tentacles hooked to?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t want those two telling people on their own ,. That would start a panic. Let’s go.” I looked around, and after a moment or two located the thin line of vertical light between the swing doors. We started to shuffle toward it, wary of scattered cartons, one of Ollie’s pudgy hands clamped over my forearm. it occurred to me that all of us had lost our flashlights.
As we reached the doors, Ollie said flatly: “What we saw it’s impossible, David.
You know that, don’t you? Even if a van from the Boston Seaquarium drove out back and dumped out one of those gigantic squids like in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, it would die. It would just die. ”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”
“So what happened? Huh? What happened? What is that damned mist?”
“Ollie, I don’t know.” We went out.
V. An Argument with Norton.
A Discussion Near the Beer Cooler.
Verification.
Jim and his good buddy Myron were just outside the doors, each with a Budweiser in his fist. I looked at Billy, saw he was still asleep, and covered him with the ruglike mover’s pad. He moved a little, muttered something, and then Jay still again. I looked at my watch. It was 12:15 P.m. That seemed utterly impossible; it felt as if at least five hours had passed since I had first gone in there to look for something to cover him with. But the whole thing, from first to last, had taken only about thirty-five minutes.
I went back to where Ollie stood with Jim and Myron. Ollie had taken a beer and he offered me one. I took it and gulped down half the can at once, as I had that morning cutting wood. it bucked me up a little.
Jim was Jim Grondin. Myron’s last name was LaFleur—that had its comic side, all right. Myron the flower had drying blood on his lips, chin, and cheek. The eye with the mouse under it was already swelling up. The girl in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt walked by aimlessly and gave Myron a cautious look. I could have told her that Myron was only dangerous to teenage boys intent on proving their manhood, but saved my breath. After all, Ollie was right-they had only been doing what they thought was best, although in a blind, fearful way rather than in any real common interest. And now I needed them to do what I thought was best. I didn’t think that would be a problem. They had both had the stuffing knocked out of them. Neither-especially Myron the flower-was going to be good for anything for some time to come. Something that had been in their eyes when they were fixing to send Norm out to unplug the exhaust vent had gone now.
Their peckers were no longer up.
“We’re going to have to tell these people something,” I said.
Jim opened his mouth to protest.
“Ollie and I will leave out any part you and Myron had in sending Norm out there if you’ll back up what he and I say about… well, about what got him.”
“Sure,” Jim said, pitifully eager. “Sure, if we don’t tell, people might go out there… like that woman… that woman who…” He wiped his hand across his mouth and then drank more beer quickly. “Christ, what a mess.”
“David,” Ollie said. “What—” He stopped, then made himself go on. “What if they get in? The tentacles?”
“How could they?” Jim asked. “You guys shut the door.”
“Sure,” Ollie said. “But the whole front wall of this place is plate glass.” An elevator shot my stomach down about twenty floors. I had known that, but had somehow been successfully ignoring it. I looked over at where Billy—lay asleep. I thought of those tentacles swarming over Norm. I thought about that happening to Billy.
“Plate glass,” Myron LaFleur whispered. “Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar.” I left the three of them standing by the cooler, each working a second can of beer, and went looking for Brent Norton. I found him in sober-sided conversation with Bud Brown at Register 2. The pair of them-Norton with his styled gray hair and his elderlystud good looks, Brown with his dour New England phiz—looked like something out of a New Yorker cartoon.
As many as two dozen people milled restlessly in the space between the end of the checkout lanes and the long show window. A lot of them were lined up at the glass, looking out into the mist. I was again reminded of the people that congregate at a building site, Carmody was seated on the stationary conveyor belt of one of the checkout lanes, smoking a Parliament in a One Step at a Time filter. Her eyes measured me, found me wanting, and passed on. She looked as if she might be dreaming awake.
“Brent ” I said.
“David! Where did you get off to?”
“That’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”
“There are people back at the cooler drinking beer,” Brown said grimly. He sounded like a man announcing that X-rated movies had been shown at the deacons’ party. “I can see them in the security mirror. This has simply got to stop.”
“Brent?”
“Excuse me for a minute, would you, Mr. Brown?”
“Certainly.” He folded his arms across his chest and stared grimly up into the convex mirror. “It is going to stop. I can promise you that.” Norton and I headed toward the beer cooler in the far corner of the store, walking past the housewares and notions. I glanced back over my shoulder, noticing uneasily how the wooden beams framing the tall, rectangular sections of glass had buckled and twisted and splintered. And one of the windows wasn’t even whole, I remembered. A pie-shaped chunk of glass had fallen out of the upper corner at the instant of that queer thump.
Perhaps we could stuff it with cloth or something-maybe a bunch of those $3.59 ladies’ tops I had noticed near the wine My thoughts broke off abruptly, and I had to put the back of my hand over my mouth, as if stifling a burp. What I was really stifling was the rancid flood of horrified giggles that wanted to escape me at the thought of stuffing a bunch of shirts into a hole to keep out those tentacles that had carried Norm away. I had seen one of those tentacles—a small one-squeeze a bag of dog food until it simply ruptured.
“David ? Are you okay?”
“Huh?”
“Your face-you looked like you just had a good idea or a bloody awful one.” Something hit me then. “Brent, what happened to that man who came in raving about something in the mist getting John Lee Frovin?”
“The guy with the nosebleed?”
“Yes, him.”
“He passed out and Brown brought him around with some smelling salts from the first-aid kit. Why?”
“Did he say anything else when he woke up?”
“He started in on that hallucination. Brown conducted him up to the office.
He was frightening some of the women. He seemed happy enough to go. Something about the glass. When Brown said there was only one small window in the manager’s office, and that that one was reinforced with wire, he seemed happy enough to go. I presume he’s still there.”
“What he was talking about is no hallucination.”